Oracle acquires Nimbula, buys way into open clouds

Oracle has announced plans to acquire Nimbula, an purchase that gives the database company a route into the open source OpenStack cloud management system, and a private cloud software stack as well.

The strategic buy was announced on Wednesday morning by a brief statement posted on Nimbula and Oracle's websites.

Nimbula builds cloud management software that lets people spin-up on-premise pools of visualized storage and compute. The company's executive team is led by Chris Pinkham, a key architect of Amazon's cloud computing platform EC2, along with other AWS veterans.

The Nimbula buy gives Oracle another way of controlling enterprises' data centers, and Nimbula's technology "is complementary to Oracle," the companies wrote in a dual statement.

In 2012, Nimbula upgraded its technology to have full API compatibility for OpenStack, the IT industry's open source cloud platform.

Oracle has huge ambitions in the cloud but, so far, little to show for it. Though the big red database giant has announced plans for a huge infrastructure cloud, it is yet to appear.

So far, all we have from Ellison & Co. is a set of software-as-a-service tools and a lot of characteristic bragging.

The transaction should close in the first half of 2013. At the time of writing neither Oracle or Nimbula had responded to requests for comment.

From El Reg's point of view, the acquisition gives Oracle a team that can tell it what's going on in OpenStack – the open source cloud management system that has banded-together top IT vendors in their fight against the margin-destroying AWS cloud.

This is an important in for Oracle, and something of a personality change, as the company tends to dislike collaborating with other companies.

Along with that, it gives Oracle a software package that can plug into a varied data center and make all the hardware dance as one cloud – a neat tool for a company that is trying to sell hardware appliances into diverse infrastructures, at a time when CIOs are having nightmares about how interoperable their systems are going to be with the coming cloud-heavy era. ®